Epilogue B
T.N.T.
T.N.T.
“I used to have one of these.” I told Karen. “The Faulcon de Lacy Sidewinder, mark one.” I looked up at it and sighed. Not out of nostalgia. More out of fear. Dread. Foreboding. And not a little resignation. The word “Deathtrap” sprang to mind, but I wasn’t going to tell her that, not right now. Instead I decided to bore her with a history lesson while I tried to figure out a way of telling her that she wouldn’t be coming with me on this mission. Perhaps she’d fall asleep during my monotonous monologue and I could sneak out without her noticing, I hoped.
“The first ones rolled off the lines about thirty years ago and they are about the cheapest thing you can fly in. It is built around a DeLacy Spin Ionic MV drive motor, which is why this one will fly in a partial atmosphere while all the other starships can’t. The first models couldn’t even jump to hyperspace, well not until the compact FSD was invented.” I told her. “Before that they were used as local patrol ships and taxis. Still are in some systems.”
“It’s nice.” She commented, feigning interest. “Small, but cute. I like the colour.”
“I know a used ship salesman that’ll love you to pieces.” I smiled. “It’s cheap for a reason. Well, several reasons, in fact.”
“Oh?”
“It’s hull is made of what feels like cardboard if you punch it. It’s dog slow, if it has shields they are inviably weak, the cargo hold is tiny and it can only be fitted with the smallest of weapons. Given how compact the thing is, it’s a bloody miracle that it even works.” I grinned. “Other starship manufacturers have tried to design vessels to edge in on its corner of the market, but they end up being much bigger and much more expensive, and they lose the one thing that makes a Sidewinder useful beyond being a basic trainer.” I told her, running my hands across the belly of the low, squat ship as we waited in the cavern behind the shield wall. I didn’t have fond memories of my Sidewinder. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get rid of the thing. Every trip out into the black in a Sidewinder is conducted with the expectation that you’ll be coming home in an escape capsule. How explorers can get to Sagittarius and circumnavigate the galactic fringes in one of these tihsboxes is a mystery beyond my understanding.
I remember mine being cramped, uncomfortable, spartan, noisy, hot, unreliable, smelly (though that was probably me) and fragile. On the up side it was cheap to repair, which was just as well, given how easy it was to break it. The upgrade to a Cobra III had been liberating in all manner of ways. I know that some people remember their first ship fondly, in a way analogous to grounders looking back with nostalgia on their first car or skimmer and barely remembering just how terrible a vehicle it was as those memories lay buried beneath the joy of the freedom that it gave, the first such freedom most of us ever experience. I didn’t feel that way about the Sidewinder. I was just glad to see the back of it and move on to something with headroom, with a bridge rather than a cramped cockpit that was practically impossible to stretch your legs in, a ship with power to spare, room to grow and effective body odour filters.
“Well?” Karen nudged me with an elbow.
“Huh?”
“What’s the one thing that makes one of these toys useful?” She pressed. Clearly I wasn’t being boring enough.
“Maneuverability.” I smiled. “Not much can out-turn a Sidewinder, and the few ships that can will have trouble landing shots on target because it’s footprint is so small. At five hundred metres, it’s almost obscured by the cross hairs on the gunsights of modern heads up displays. In a turning engagement it really comes into it’s own and a pilot who can fly one unpredictably will be extremely tough to take down.”
“I have faith in you, darling. If there’s anything I’ve learned about your flying this last few years is that you are nothing if not unpredictable. I suppose that comes from not having much of a clue what you’re doing and making it up as you go?” She smiled sweetly. For a heartbeat I considered letting her actually fly this suicide mission alongside me. Then that smile melted me as it always has done and I realised that I couldn’t deny humanity such beauty in these ugly times.
A rumble from deeper in the cavern announced the arrival of the shunt engine pushing the rail trucks with the enhanced neutron weapons ahead of it. Kyle sat on the buffers of the lead car as it rounded the bend and waved the driver onward, urging him to slow as the trucks approached the waiting Sidewinder. A dozen uniformed marines jogged alongside, then as the train drew to a halt they manhandled the first weapon off the flatbed and laboriously carried it the final few yards to a scaffold platform that had been hastily assembled beneath the keel of the ship. For ten minutes I watched them huff and puff, heave and curse, swear and hammer at the fittings as they latched the two nukes onto jury rigged, Heath Robinson inspired fittings mounted onto the ship’s fuselage with explosive bolts. I studied the complex arrangement of metalwork critically, concerned that the air resistance of the terraforming atmosphere would tear the bombs clean off the fuselage when I boosted.
Kenzie wiped his hands on a rag and strode up to us once the manual labour had finished their task. “That’s it, she’s ready to go.” He told us as the soldiers turned to dismantling the scaffolding. “Both warheads are powered up but won’t arm until their accelerometers reach a forward velocity of fifty metres per second. After that the things are live and will detonate on impact, so you can either drop them or suicide into the bugs. Your call on that.” He nodded solemnly. “The only change to the standard cockpit layout is the addition of two toggle switches to either side of the throttle lever – each one to jettison a nuke. Hit ‘em and the bang-bolts will separate the bombs from the ship and they will free fall and explode on impact. We want a ground burst if possible for maximum shock on top of the neutron pulse, so don’t set ‘em off early by accidentally crashing the Sidey into a Scout.”
“I’ll do my best. What’s the blast radius?”
“Not that large, actually, as damage output has been compromised to provide a higher neutron throw. The physical damage zone will be about three kilometers in diameter, so once they are dropped you need to get at least that far away or your Sidewinder, even on full shields, won’t survive the fireball or the shock wave. The neutron pulse is deadly out to five k.”
Kenzie reached into a case and pulled out two flasks of a clear liquid. “Drink this. All of it. It’ll give you increased protection from the radiation, but obviously the closer you are to the ground zero, the higher the rads you’ll receive. There’s a Geiger logger in the cockpit. If it goes into the red then you’re dead, it’s just your body hasn’t realised it yet. Amber, and a well outfitted med bay on a cap ship will probably be able to save you before you grow a second head. Green and you’ll be fine. Your kids may be Siamese twins, but you’ll be fine. Drink it now.”
He handed one to Karen and one to me. I drained my flask in one go and handed it back. Karen watched me, then followed suit, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. “Tasted like ssip.” She complained, pulling a face.
Mine had been totally tasteless. Just like water. Which is what mine was.
“How long?” I asked him.
“Give it about a minute to get into the system. You might want to be sitting down when it kicks in, ma’am.” Kenzie warned.
“I’m not your mam.” Karen told him in her heavy Welsh sounding accent as she settled her shapely butt on the nose skid of the Sidewinder.
I sat beside her and put my arm around her, holding her close. “I’ve loved you since I first set eyes on you,” I told her. “Every minute I have spent with you makes me realise what a waste of time my life before you was. My one regret is that we won’t get to grow old together.”
“kcuF, Kyle. What did you put in that stuff? It’s turned him all squishy. He hasn’t been like that since we first started dating and even then it creeped me out.”
“Ketamine.”
“Ketamine?” She asked, screwing up her face in confusion. “Isn’t that the stuff that…..” Too drowsy to complete the sentence, she fell forward in my arms as the tranquiliser commonly used on the farms of her home world for putting horses to sleep overwhelmed her. I swept her prone body up in my arms and carried her across to the mine trucks that had delivered the weapon, gently laying her down on the flatbed. I brushed some hair from her eyes and kissed her tenderly on the lips and then her forehead.
“Goodbye slinky.” I whispered. “You know, she’s gonna kill you for this when she wakes up.” I smiled at Kenzie.
“She’ll be out for hours, the amount of sedative I put in her flask. If this fails and the bugs do overrun us, she’ll never even be aware of it. One way or another you won’t be apart for long.” He promised me. “Good luck.” He said, stretching his right hand out to me. This time I accepted it. “Fly dangerous, you mad dratsab.”
“Always. See you in the next.” I nodded as we broke apart and I turned to climb up into the Sidewinder.
“Hey, Joker, you can do this, right?” Kyle asked as he watched me climb aboard.
One of Alain’s old sayings sprang to mind. “Like shooting whomp rats back on uncle Beru’s banana plantation on Aldebaraan.” I told him as I jammed the helmet onto my head and tightened the strap. To this day I have no idea what any of it means.
I clambered into the tight confines of the Sidewinder’s cramped cockpit and settled into the single seat. I could have told Karen that there was no room in the ship for two people, but she’d have insisted on squeezing her lithe frame in there somewhere, probably sat on my lap, and that would have just made things more difficult for me, as pleasant as having her sat on my lap usually is. She would have just been in the way, a hindrance more than a help. Also, with her safe on the ground I was deeply committed to making this mission a success. Her survival depended on what I did in the next few minutes. It was no longer about saving the collective butts of Kenzie, the marines and the handful of faceless survivors trapped in the mine, it was now all about making sure my wife survived. Nothing else mattered. Even if I died it would be worth the price. Blood is freedom’s stain, as a great man once said.
I strapped myself in, dialing the belt tension up to 1.4g, mated the bone dome’s comms to the ship’s COVAS and plugged in the compressed air line for the flight suit’s counter-g mesh, feeling the numerous diaphragms constrict and then relax as it went through a self test. “Comms check.”
“Five by five, Joker.” Kenzie replied.
“That’s Commander Kerr to you, jarhead.” I told him. “Am I clear for engine start?”
“Hold on, commander.” Kenzie ordered. “We’re tuning the shield wall down for you to pass through it. Don’t start the engine until you’re about to depart. We don’t know how long it’ll run in this atmosphere.”
“Roger that. Standing by.”
I double checked various systems readings while I waited for the shield generator at the tunnel mouth to be turned down enough for the Sidewinder to pass through it without stalling. The scanner already showed at least fourteen enemy ships patrolling within a kilometer of the tunnel mouth. No friendlies. I would be sticking my head into a hornet’s nest. I closed my eyes, not so much saying a prayer as making peace with my own internal deity. It had been a good life, I admitted. Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fade away anonymously, remembered by nobody. I wondered if this was how Jameson had felt when he’d been sent out to end the first Thargoid war. Did his hands shake as mine had just started doing, I mused as I opened my eyes and studied my trembling gloved fingers.
Nah. He was one of the original Elite. The best of the best, back when being Elite meant something so much more than it does these days. I was just ranked Dangerous, not even Deadly. Slinky often joked that I was more dangerous to myself than to my targets, but hey – I made it this far. Just like John Jameson, I was being sent on a one-man suicide mission to save the galaxy. Well, a moon at any rate. A strange calmness washed over me as I waited, and my hands suddenly stilled. All extraneous noise seemed to become muffled, the sound of my own breathing the only thing that I could hear clearly, and my vision narrowed to the gradually dimming shield wall at the end of the tunnel. Blinking lights and gauges instantly connected to my subconscious, as if I had spent all of my life strapped to a Sidewinder. I had somehow become assimilated with the ship, an integral component of the system, synchronised with the mechanical and electrical devices that made it work.
The ghost of John Jameson possessed me, I later convinced myself, although at the time I just thought it was my own courage overriding my natural fears. There was no other explanation. One moment my hands were shaking, then the mental image of my boyhood hero rising unbidden to my consciousness seemed to obliterate the sudden onset of those fears. I accepted that this was my destiny, that perhaps it had been all along, the boyhood dreams of glory battling the Thargoid menace finally coming true, but with a nasty sting in the tail. As much as I had dreamed of being the next Jameson when I was a child, never had the thought that my demise would be inextricably linked with living such a life even entered my mind. Now that I was here, living the dream so to speak, it was clear that the nightmare end that had befallen Jameson would also be mine to suffer. If life, as philosophers say, is what you make it then so, it seems, is death.
I clenched my fists and flexed my fingers, the act exorcising the ghost, and gently took hold of the control stick and throttles, my abnormally heightened senses feeling the minute vibrations of the Sidewinder’s purring reactor. The HUD display flashed an alert. Incoming text message. I opened the new mail to find just two characters in the message. Unsigned, anonymous.
O7
The ghost of John Jameson?
“All clear, Joker. Go kick some ass.”
“Acknowledged Colonel. Save me some of that Scotch. I’ll be back in two shakes of a tiger’s tail.” I murmured and held down the engine start button. The vibrations increased noticeably, and I tapped the belly thrusters, lifting the gear off the deck and then retracting it smartly, applying a smidgeon of thrust to stabilise the Sidewinder. The shield wall loomed large ahead, and I carefully nudged up the speed and deployed the Sidewinder’s anti-xeno multicannons, keeping it below the fifty metres per second required to arm the bombs. If I misjudged the exit and crunched into something on the way out the bombs might blow inside the tunnel and vaporise every human being left on the moon, including Karen. Keeping below fifty meant that both bombs remained safe, or as safe as nuclear weapons ever can be.
The ship shuddered as it broached the shield wall and in the blink of an eye I was through. Immediately I rammed the throttle to the stops and punched out a heatsink block and a bundle of chaff to break the lock any slammer (shoulder launched anti-air missile) might have on the ‘winder. The ground rushed by barely thirty feet below me and I watched Thargoid warriors reflexively drop into crouches.
“One” I counted in my head as the ship broke through the two hundred meters per second mark.
“Two.” I banked to starboard slightly to steer toward where the main Thargoid ground assault was massing.
“Three.” I yanked back on the control column and hit boost, simultaneously smashing my hand down on the port bomb pickle button. I heard a loud bang and felt the ‘winder instantly begin to roll as the weight of one of the bombs disappeared from one side of the ship. The Sidewinder rocketed skyward, and so did the released nuke, following me upward for a few moments before gravity began to pull it back down again. I had performed a maneuver known as a ‘bomb toss’ where the pilot releases the bomb while climbing hard, buying himself extra time to clear the blast zone. It was the only way I was going to survive the detonation, and was the primary reason why I had agreed to take on this mission in the first place. I just hoped it worked – that the bomb arced over slowly enough for me to get more than three kilometres away, and that it’s rudimentary guidance package detonated it somewhere near the target. I had no desire to make a second run on the massed Thargoids. Next time they would be able to see me coming and the sky would be alive with scouts, dropships and slammers.
Now alert to my presence, the Thargoid scouts began to give chase, homing in on me. I punched out another heat sink and blanked them out of my mind for a moment, concentrating on making my ascent to space directly above the estimated ground zero.
“Seven.” At two hundred metres per second I had travelled almost a kilometre since pickling off the first bomb. The Sidewinder shook from a hit by a Thargoid plasma bolt, and I squirmed the ship about, rolling and yawing hard to throw off their aim, hoping that the one remaining missile didn’t tear free of its mounts as the g-suit compressed about my legs to keep the blood in my head and prevent me from GLOCing.
My count reached fifteen when the nuke detonated, everything around me flashing a blinding, brilliant white. A punch in the back as the shock wave caught up with my ship sent the Sidewinder staggering esra over t-i-t momentarily, forcing me to fight to bring the dratsab back under control. A glance at the radiation dosimeter showed that the detector had pegged in high amber, just short of the red zone. So far so good. Any kids Karen and I might have in the future would have birth defects, but I had survived, thanks in part to the Cobra’s shielding. The scanner had dropped offline at the EM pulse from the nuke and went into a forced reset, so I had no idea where the T-scouts were in relation to my flight path.
I glanced over my shoulder as the ship climbed past five thousand meters and became mesmerised by the roiling red and brown fireball climbing up from the ground behind me. The silhouetted octagonal shapes of rising scout ships were visible in the light thrown by the flames, but there didn’t seem as many chasing me as there had been when I had lofted the bomb. When the scanner rebooted and came back online it showed only three remaining. I assumed the nuke had blown the rest away, just as the plan Kenzie and I had concocted had theorised – put them behind me, as close to ground zero as possible and detonate the bomb just as I reached the safe threshold and anything behind me should have been caught in the explosion, we’d reasoned. I wondered if I’d be able to claim the credit for those eleven kills, then remembered that in all likelihood I wouldn’t be alive to cash the chips in. You didn’t get much for a scout anyway.
Bizarrely, the scouts - despite being faster than my Sidewinder – began to fall away. And I mean literally fall away. The concentrated neutron radiation that they had absorbed by being unshielded and in close proximity to the nuke’s detonation point had overwhelmed their organic components and, while not yet dead, they had lost enough vitality to cease being an immediate threat. The blast hadn’t killed them, but slowly the radiation was. They were withering away in my wake. A weakly armed dropship heading down from the hive ship high up in orbit veered across the nose of my Sidewinder, pulling up sharply to save itself from descending into the radioactive mushroom cloud and I reflexively raked it from stem to stern with AX cannon shells that sparked against its fuselage before I was past it and heading on upward, on a near vertical zoom climb into space, toward the planetary escape vector. Worryingly, the ionic drive began to cough, no doubt irreparably damaged by operating at full power in a partial atmosphere.
As soon as the mass locked indicator winked off I slammed the FSD engage lever fully forward and launched the ship into supercruise and temporary safety. Nothing in regular space could touch me here, but a Thargoid interceptor could hypothetically hyperdict me and drag me back out into normal space. I banked around, reduced speed to minimum supercruise and sent out a honk on the full spectrum scanner. There were dozens of targets, but one of them stood out starkly in the middle of all that activity – the hive ship, still disgorging dropships and scouts. I locked the massive mothership up on the nav computer and banked back around.
Time to die.
I dropped out of supercruise eight kilometres from the hive ship and immediately the patrolling scouts, basilisks, hydrae and cyclopes spun to face me. The ionic drive spluttered, but then caught again almost straight away. All I had to do was survive until I was a couple of kilometers out and then I could let them kill me, my own ship’s destruction bringing about the detonation of the nuclear bomb, the resultant neutron radiation doing who knows what damage to the hive ship and everything else within the blast radius of the weapon.
The first Thargoid plasma bolts started hitting me at six kilometers out, my shields glowing bright blue with the dissipation of their impacts yet some damage was still being taken by the hull. Shields aren’t totally effective against Thargoid energy weapons. In a matter of moments the shielding collapsed and I began to swerve as violently as I possibly could, banking, corkscrewing, rolling, diving, doing everything I could to throw off any lead computing devices that the Thargoids were using to predict my flight path so that they could not land shots on my ship. The g-suit’s diaphragms and constrictors rippled all over my body, trying to keep the blood in my head and stop me from blacking out due to the g-forces I was forcing myself through. The ship creaked and groaned around me, each plasma bolt that hit it weakening the hull further, increasing the chances of it breaking apart under the extreme stresses of my violent maneuvering.
Inadvertently I flew through the edge of a Thargon swarm that had been launched by a Basilisk, feeling multiple detonations against the hull as the firefly like things hit, immediately stripping my hull strength by twenty percent. The Sidewinder couldn’t take much more of this, I knew. I glanced at the range to target indicator. One kilometer more and the hive ship would be inside the theoretical range of the neutron burst. Five more seconds. I pulled the ‘winder out of a bank, lined up on the stationary hive ship and punched off the nuke and my last heatsink simultaneously. The bangs of the explosive bolts firing went unnoticed amongst all the other impacts that the ship was suffering. If the Thargoids got me now – and all it would take was a lucky hit on a critical system - at least the weapon had a chance of continuing on and hitting the mothership.
Inertia carried the nuclear weapon straight on, now detached from the Sidewinder but travelling through space just a few hundred metres ahead of my ship. A Berserker screamed between the nuke and the Sidewinder, passing across my gunsights, and I depressed the fire trigger for the multi cannons. Not one shell hit the dratsab – it was gone before the cannons had even spooled up. I reduced speed, settled the targeting reticle on the nuke, and flew the Sidewinder until the tumbling warhead was dead centre in the HUD gunsights. A Medusa appeared below and ahead of me on a collision course, but I ignored it, my focus solely on making the nuke detonate now that the range to the hive ship was less than four kilometres.
There was a flash of bright light, then another, and another, then suddenly dozens of identical flashes filled the space around me. The Medusa suddenly veered away, it’s attention drawn elsewhere. Inbound Berserkers, Marauders and a Regenerator similarly banked away, and a check of the scanner showed that a Basilisk that had been on my tail had abandoned it’s pursuit and was instead arcing up and over the top of me. The scanner also showed dozens of new contacts ahead and above me, between six and ten kilometres out. The hive ship was now just over three kilometres ahead, and the nuke was still tumbling towards it. The giant bug carrier began to move out of its orbit, slowly, ponderously, it’s mass not conducive to high acceleration. I began to think that I had made a massive mistake. Had I kept the nuke mated to the Sidewinder and believed in my own ability to survive the onslaught of Scouts and Interceptors I could have altered my own course to stay on target. Now the nuke was on its own, unguided, relying solely upon the timing of its release to hit the target, and my pursuers had for some unknown reason decided to abandon me and let me push on through. Ah well, Kenzie and I had agreed that the hive ship had always been a bonus target. Not even I had expected I’d make it this far. Without the sudden and unexpected appearance of whatever had distracted the Thargoid fighters I would have probably been killed already, the nuke wasted on whatever happened to be close by when I got nailed.
The reason why the Thargoids were abandoning their pursuit of me soon became apparent. Bigger, more threatening fish had just swum into the pond. Around me the Imperial Interdictors and their escorts that the Empire had promised would be here two days ago had finally arrived and began to fight their way through the ranks of Thargoid scouts and interceptors, green flashes of their destruction lighting up the darkened superstructure of the hive ship, bright laser beams and the smoke trails of missiles criss-crossing the sky as they sought targets and swatted them aside. I couldn’t be sure, but the nuke looked to be on target still, was tumbling through space almost unnoticed and stood a good chance of getting within a couple of kilometres of the hive ship, despite the latter’s belated evasion attempt.
“Keep clear of the mothership.” I broadcast in the clear. “That Mike Foxtrot is all mine!” Even as the words came out of my mouth I could imagine the disbelieving looks on the faces of two dozen starship captains as some lowly commander in an unshielded Sidewinder was claiming a massive Thargoid hive ship as his own solo kill. I could have warned them that there was a darkened nuke tumbling toward it, but I didn’t want to risk tipping the Thargoids off – after all this time they must have worked out how to understand our language and comms systems. I hoped the shielding of an any Imperial Interdictor that got too close would be able to withstand most of the blast and mitigate the radiation effects.
I mashed my finger down on the triggers and cannon shells converged on the nuke, hammering it, but the blasted thing refused to detonate. I moved the distributor to full engines and was about to hit boost in a last minute attempt to crash the ‘winder into the warhead, but then a Cyclops, sent spiraling in its death throes after being savaged by an Interdictor’s massive beam lasers, crossed into the path of the nuke. My eyes went wide and I pulled back on the stick and hit boost, screaming out a rebel yell to try and keep from blacking out under a turn that peaked at almost thirteen G whilst simultaneously praying that I didn’t crash into anything nearby.
I didn’t see the explosion, but everything went white even through my closed eyelids. The Cyclops was instantly vaporised, and the space around it was saturated with a brief pulse of high intensity prompt neutron radiation. With no air to absorb the neutron burst, and nothing substantial between it and the detonation of the ERW other than a smattering of scouts and dropships, the hive ship received the full brunt of the neutron shock wave, at almost maximum intensity. My Sidewinder didn’t fare much better. When I opened my eyes the first thing I focused on was the dosimeter, and it did not make good reading. The needle was now pegged deep into the red region of the readout, probably because my shields had been knocked out and the Sidewinder’s hull didn’t have much in the way of neutron scattering hydrogenous plating anyway. What had Kenzie told me that would mean? Oh yeah. I was already dead – my body just hadn’t caught up with that fact.
A wave of nausea washed over me and I fought to choke back a mouthful of vomit. Tiredness came next as I swallowed the burning bile back down. I stabilised the tumbling of the Sidewinder, released the control columns and flicked the circuit breaker for the main engine off, rubbed my eyes and loosened the seat harness. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the hive ship pivot sharply about to face the incoming Imperial fleet, seemingly undamaged. I had died for nothing, it seemed. Then the luminous glow about the Thargoid began to fade, flickering once even, and in seconds the vessel went dark altogether for a few moments before the concentrated fire of half a dozen cruisers that had broken through the outer defences of Tharg interceptors began to pummel it, severing huge chunks off it with their massive beam lasers and Gauss cannons. As my eyelids began to droop and my vision began to tunnel, the sight of the enemy ship exploding in a brilliant green fireball and its debris falling out of orbit to eventually impact with the moon sometime after I died brought a flicker of a smile to my lips.
I coughed, ignoring blood that bubbled out and ran down my chin as I toggled the comms, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn't sound boastful or trite. Releasing the mike button, I slumped deeper down into the pilot’s seat and sighed my last breath.
The creaking of my battered Sidewinder faded away to nothing, the distant rumble of the reactor similarly disappearing as my narrowing vision finally went black. For a moment. Slowly, an apparition appeared before me out of the darkness, and I knew that this was in my mind and was not being registered by my eyes. A commander, his flight suit a century or more out of fashion but reassuringly familiar to me from childhood dreams, docuvids and dramatisations of the first Thargoid war, stood rigidly at attention before me, throwing a crisp, precise military salute my way as he smiled warmly. Behind him, slowly coalescing out of the gloom, I could see rank after rank of his peers mirroring his acknowledgement, stretching back as far as my mind could see.
I had finally joined The Elite.
end
Comments welcome.
This was written for fun, not for profit, though I did submit it to Frontier because it had elements of all anticipated future content within the pages. Space legs, EVA, ground combat and fleet carriers. The answer I received was "We are not looking to publish anything Elite Dangerous related at this time."
Fair enough.
So, after finishing it, I started writing another one. I can be masochistic with my free time to a level that frustrates those around me.
Callsign J-KR 2 will take things a bit further and tear strips out of lore. Well, if FD aren't adding any content for a while, I'll take it on. So be prepared for non canon revelations about Equinox, Thunderchild, Gail and - of course - Raxxla. Take it all with a pinch of salt.
I apologise for my writing style. I'm not a writer. I just tell stories. That's all I have tried to do here. I hope any of you that have persevered - and I appreciate what a tall order that is - have enjoyed the tale.
Tomorrow I will post the prologue for #2 and that'll be the last you hear from me creatively until it's completed.
Thanks for reading.
Ash
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